The Trouble with Wikileaks

If the good patriots keeping the world safe for democracy feel they need to keep certain things secret, then they need to keep certain things secret. To splash those secrets all over the internet is simply to interfere with America’s attempt to carry its noble burden, to perform its urgent and necessary task, to make the world a little less safe for democracy. What kind of person would do that?

The more plausible that line of thought sounds to you, the more WikiLeaks will strike you as something akin to a terrorist enterprise. But the more you see a hegemonic America as a problem and not a solution, the more WikiLeaks will strike you as a welcome check on a dangerous, out-of-control hyperpower drunk on its own good intentions [bold mine-DL]. In that case, it may seem that the American political establishment and the collaborating media has grown blind to the hypocrisy so clearly apparent to others in its approach to WikiLeaks because it has forgotten that freedom and democracy have meaning apart from their role in justifying the operations of the far-flung secret-shrouded state. ~Will Wilkinson

I have seen different forms of this argument in the last few weeks. This is the second of them from Wilkinson. Each time I see it, I find it more annoying than the last. For one thing, it assumes that American critics of U.S. hegemony should welcome active subversion of their government’s legitimate functioning as a means of holding it accountable for its abuses and illegalities. This is as politically tone-deaf as can be, and it will almost certainly backfire to make the government less accountable and less transparent. I find the idea that all good anti-imperialists have to stand up for an organization that seems dedicated to harming American interests to be perverse, and it just the sort of argument that militarists here in the U.S. are only too happy to see libertarians, antiwar conservatives, and progressives take up. American opposition to U.S. hegemony as I understand it is rooted in the conviction that hegemony is unsustainable and damaging to real American interests in the meantime. It takes for granted that there are legitimate American interests that can and should be pursued, and that U.S. hegemony badly distorts our understanding of what our real interests are, conflates them with the interests of other nations, and wastes national resources on a project of global power projection that America can’t afford and doesn’t need. Enthusiasm for Assange distracts from all of this and substitutes the cheap thrill of airing some dirty laundry for the difficult task of changing the foreign policy consensus.

Wikileaks doesn’t interfere with “America’s attempt to carry its noble burden, to perform its urgent and necessary task, to make the world a little less safe for democracy.” All of that is risible nonsense. So is much of the anti-Wikileaks hysteria. If it is true that the information provided by Wikileaks hasn’t caused all that much damage, which its defenders argue by way of exonerating it from more serious charges, it is even more of an ineffectual bit of posturing than it seemed at first. It seems to me that would-be defenders of Wikileaks have made the easy mistake of imputing virtues to Wikileaks that it doesn’t have out of frustration with government abuses and disastrous policies. This comes from the tempting, mistaken belief that if these people oppose government abuses, it must make what they’re doing all right. All of this is an exercise in cheering on someone who has poked the hegemon in the eye without considering the counterproductive nature of such a protest.

The first an most obvious rejoinder to this is that even non-exceptional countries require diplomatic secrecy! So if you embrace the notion that confidentiality is a sine qua non for the ability to conduct effective diplomacy then you would certainly believe that Wikileaks’ modus operandi is dangerous and counter-productive.

Anyone who thinks we can disentangle the U.S. from our many commitments around the world without substantial international goodwill, cooperation, and trust is kidding himself. Undermining the confidence that other nations’ diplomats have in dealing with our diplomats reduces the options available to U.S. policymakers, and it makes it harder for Washington to employ tools other than the blunt instruments of force and coercion that Wikileaks admirers find so objectionable.

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52 Responses to The Trouble with Wikileaks

” I’m generally not in favor of “nation-building” or “state-building,” or whatever one wants to call it, but if we had any justification for having a military presence in Afghanistan I assume that there are some minimal obligations to that country that come with that.”

I think that goes to the heart of our differences with respect to Afghanistan. The only reason we were in Afghanistan in 2001 was that the Taliban had provided a safe harbor and asylum to Osama Bin Ladin and Al Qaeda which then orchestrated not only the attacks of 9/11 but earlier attacks against the U.S. Our invasion of Afghanistan was justified by the attack on the U.S. and for no other reason. We did not invade Afghanistan to make it a “better” country or to improve the plight of Afghan women and girls.

Our invasion of Afghanistan imposed no moral obligation on the U.S. to do anything beyond destroying or removing Al Qaeda. I’m not sure why you would “assume” the U.S. had some minimal obligations to Afghanistan; you don’t make such lazy assumptions when it comes to Georgia, for example. The U.S. has never had any vital national interests in Afghanistan, unless it is to secure the opium poppy production. As it turned out, our intervention in 2001 was accomplished at relatively small cost and little loss of life, much to my pleasant suprise. We should have followed the famous advice given by the Senator from Vermont back in the 1960’s with respect to Vietnam: declared victory and brought our troops home—coupled with a warning to Afghanistan that if Al Qaeda were permitted to return, we would return not with troops but with a nonstop bombing campaign until Al Qaeda was totally destroyed. As the old song goes, you have to know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em.

As it stands now, by prolonging our presence in Afghanistan, we have succeeded in converting a splendid little victory into a long, drawn out, terribly expensive defeat—for that is how our inevitable wthdrawal will be portrayed, with some justification. Whether we call it that or not, it is clear that we have been engaged in “nation building.” We have been spending eight years and untold billions training the “Afghan army,” even trying to teach the largely illiterate recruits how to read. Sounds like nation building to me. Moreover, we have switched the goal posts. What started out as a war directed at Al Qaeda, which was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, has now become, in the words of President Obama, a war to “defeat the Taliban.” Since the Taliban is largely composed of one of the ethnic groups that comprise Afghanistan, we are imposing ourselves in the middle of an Afghan civil war. Unless you accept the preposterous suggestion of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu that the Taliban actually instigated Al Qaeda to attack the U.S. on 9/11, we have no argument with the Taliban. Whether Afghanistan is ultimately controlled by the backward, brutal religious fanatics of the Taliban or the backward, brutal, corrupt drug dealing Karzai family should be a matter of indifference to the U.S. As Jim Baker would put it, we don’t have a dog in that fight. I fail to see how it can be regarded as a victory for the U.S. if one or the other wins power after we withdraw. Afghanistan would revert to its natural state, where life is brutal, nasty and short.

I am a little surprised that you base so much of your analysis on what other people think. You cite antiwar friends on the right who supported the Afghan war during the years of Bush’s incompetent management and then turned against it once it was under “new, improved management.” You cite antiwar Republicans who really want to take the gloves off in Afghanistan and at heart really want to start a war with Iran. I’m not sure why their positions should affect your judgment. For the record, I supported the first Gulf War under Bush I, opposed the sending of troops to Somalia under the same President, opposed our involvement in the Balkans under Clinton, supported the initial decision to invade Afghanistan, opposed the Iraq War under Bush II, and am strongly opposed to war with Iran.

As I recall, Pat Buchanan opposed the first Gulf War. I disagreed with him but never questioned his patriotism or the patriotism of the Democrats in Congress who were overwhelmingly opposed to that war. There are several issues where I have strong disagreements with Pat Buchanan, but I don’t let that affect my judgment when it comes to issues where I strongly agree with him. George Will was an ardent cheerleader for the Iraq War back in 2003 and disparaged the claims of the U.N. inspection team and specifically Mr. El Baredei that there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq. Two years later Mr. Will’s position of Iraq had turned 180 degrees, and he discovered that the Iraq adventure contradicted all his conservative principles. The way I look at these people who supported the Afghan War for a lot longer than I before turning against it is that, like Mr. Will, they have finally seen the light. After all, the Afghan War has been going on for more than nine years now, so it should could come as no surprise that people change their opinions.

When I posted on Yahoo back on March 17, 2003 that I was opposed to the Iraq War, somebody replied that “you’re certainly in the minority.” To which I responded: “Maybe right now. Let’s see how the war turns out and how many support it if it turns out badly. A majority of Americans originally supported the war with Vietnam. You know who opposed the war back then? France, Germany, England, and the other NATO countries. And do you know who agreed with those countries back then: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and countless others in this administration who now want to send our men and women in harm’s way but back then didn’t want to put their own lives on the line. Don’t get me wrong. I supported Bush on Afghanistan and the war on terror. I just think we got off the tracks with this Iraq thing.” http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Stocks_%28A_to_Z%29/Stocks_S/threadview?m=tm&bn=7199&tid=31666&mid=31703&tof=-1&rt=1&frt=2&off=1

IMHO, the problem with Afghanistan isn’t as much of a resource problem as the will problem. Specifically, there is no will in Afghanistan to build a successful state, there is no will among the Afghan elites to pursue Afghan interests over both India’s and Pakistan’s; no matter how many resources we commit and how sound our counter-insurgency strategy is unless those factors change we will not succeed. (….) …and now it’s time to leave and let countries who have vested interest in the welfare of Afghanistan pick up the burden.

The persistent error in conventional analyses is a poorly warranted, never questioned assumption that Afghanistan as it is constituted is part of the regional solution and should be sustained. Or if properly reinforced/aided/defended, the solution.

I’m convinced the present configuration is inviable and insustainable. And the core problem. The actual social and political structure of the place is a roughly equal division between Indic ethnic groups in the southern half and Central Asian ethnic groups in the northern half. With no social and little geographic mixing between the two, and few clear interests in common other than keep the trade roads open, fending off invading militaries, and overcoming desperate poverty.

There are all kinds of indicators that north and south are quietly forming separate entities and are probably better off going their own ways. There is the fact that the Taliban is essentially a Pashtu and Beloshi, southern, entity. The rulers of the north are pretty much their former opponents in civil war, the key figures in the former Northern Alliance. Karzai, a Pashtu politician with Pashtu allies he cultivates, got no unbought votes from the northern half of Afghanistan.

It seems to me the right thing to do is to partition the place. Let the southern half do as its elites wish, which is to become some kind of semiautonomous region or in effect province of Pakistan. The northern half can join with one or more of the Central Asian countries. At first glance both moves would seem to be invitations to disaster, of course. But at second glance these consolidations would force the various governments to scale up their thinking and their seriousness. Unlike the current pretense of a government in Kabul, governments with definite and consolidated constituencies have responsibilities and are held to them.